Graphic: Horn of Africa via Wikimedia

A mess of naval personnel announcements were pointed out to me last week. There were all kinds of flag officers being shuffled around; it looked pretty inocuous to someone like me who doesn’t have particularly deep knowledge of the U.S. military.

But there among all the shuffled officers is one Brian Losey.

More specifically, Rear Admiral Brian Losey.

It seems he’s been assigned to the Horn of Africa. Here’s an excerpt from NavyTimes.com:

Rear Adm. (lower half) Brian Losey will be assigned as commander, Combined Joint Task Force — Horn of Africa, Camp Lemonier, Djibouti. Losey is director, combating terrorism, National Security Council, Washington.

Yeah. It doesn’t look like much, could make a proud parent puff out their chest, right? But there’s one helluva lot of something going on in those 30 words.

You see, RDML Losey has only been a member of the National Security Council since late 2007, under the Bush Administration. As a member of the National Security Council, Losey has been privy to a lot of top secret national security content related to counter-terrorism. He’s now being moved to a leadership position in a real hot spot of the world, where the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption and the Cheney "Black Flag Roach Killer" approach to counter-terrorism have been applied heavily throughout Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, with widely variable degrees of success.

And RDML Losey is both moderately young — published info indicates he may be less than 50 years old and a fairly recent 2004 Master’s graduate from the National War College — and a Navy Seal.

In other words, he’s intense, lethal and Bushie-approved with access to the uppermost echelons of power during the late Bush years; it’s a combination which would leave Karl Rove panting and weak at the knees.

He’s also going to be a commander of a Combined Joint Task Force. This suggests special operations teams comprised of personnel from multiple sources — DOD and CIA in concert with similar components from other nations — will be reporting to him, handling covert ops like those we’ve been hearing about for a couple of years, up to and including elimination of individual terrorists.

Remember the hue and cry from earlier this summer about the allegedly inactive CIA hit squads which former Vice President Dick "Deadeye" Cheney tried to keep on the down-low away from Congress’s prying oversight? There have already been assassinations carried out by special ops teams — but because they were military ops in the Global War On Terror theater, there was no prohibition against their efforts since they were labeled warfare. Rumor says sloppy at times and nearly botching diplomatic relations with friendly sovereign countries, but warfare nonetheless. There wasn’t any perceived need for oversight by Congress because it was warfare.

And the Horn of Africa is a place where this kind of activity will continue, even though the label GWOT has been excised from daily use by the current administration. Somalia’s condition as a failed state has made it not only a hive of piracy, but a haven for terrorists; as long as it has no coherent and legitimate governance, Somalia will be an attractive nuisance.

That said, one has to wonder whether sending in what appears to be an intense, lethal Bushie-approved Seal-type is the best long-term answer to the problem. We’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this situation bears close monitoring since Losey is an heir apparent to the Bush/Cheney legacy. Unless, of course, RDML Losey has a more positive answer to the question, "Who is Brian Losey?"

[Graphic: Horn of Africa via Wikimedia]